ACGIH to Host Webinar on EH&S Role in Emergency Response, Planning
On Aug. 11, from 2-4:30 p.m., ACGIH® will present a webinar focused on the critical role the environmental health and safety professional plays in planning for and responding to emergency situations. The event, designed for industrial hygienists, safety professionals, risk management professionals, environmental engineers, plant managers, and others in the occupational and environmental health industry, will begin by acknowledging that, increasingly, the EH&S professional is asked to develop plans that take into account "unplanned events" such as natural disasters, utility outages, and chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons (CBRN) events and other catastrophic incidents of national significance.
ACGIH notes that the EH&S professional's role during such emergencies is not only to ensure that those initially affected by the event are protected, but to protect the responders and all members of the incident command. In most cases, the EH&S professional must collaborate with all departments within an organization to execute a proper emergency response plan. The webinar will thus walk through the critical steps in planning and operating, discussing various types of emergency events, and describe the elements of a successful response plan.
The webinar's presenters will be Anthony J. Intrepido, MS, MPH, CIH, and Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Palalay. Intrepido, a senior health scientist at ChemRisk and a retired U.S. Army officer, has more than 23 years of experience in the field of occupational hygiene and emergency response. On Sept. 11, 2001, he led the Army's Special Medical Augmentation Response Team's (SMART) Advanced Party to the Pentagon to identify, characterize, and control acute health hazards caused by the terrorist incident. In the following weeks, he supervised more than 40 Army, Navy, and Air Force industrial hygienists with the mission of protecting the health of emergency responders and the 23,000 members of the Pentagon workforce. Intrepido later led the SMART team to a three-month deployment to Capitol Hill in response to the 2001 Anthrax letters and played an integral role as a scientific advisor to the incident commander in the remediation and recovery of the contaminated facilities. He authored numerous pre-incident response and recovery plans and business continuity plans to support government agencies responding to weapons of mass destruction events and other catastrophic incidents of national significance.
Palalay is currently assigned to the Australian Defense Force, Joint Health Command, in Canberra, Australia, as part of the U.S. Military Personnel Exchange Program. His previous assignment was the Program Manager for the Army's Industrial Hygiene Field Services Program at the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine. He deployed to Iraq in 2006 to conduct environmental health site assessments and soldier occupational hazard assessments for preventive medicine units in theater. Prior to Iraq, he deployed as the lead IH in 2005 with the Army's Special Medical Augmentation Response Team-Preventive Medicine (SMART-PM) to New Orleans and Mississippi for Joint Task Force Katrina. On Sept. 11, 2001, he served as the SMART-PM Operations Management Officer in response to the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon. He holds an MS degree in industrial hygiene from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a BS degree from the University of Delaware.
For detailed information about the webinar, including the awarding of CM and COC points for participation, contact Tammy Vanderbilt at [email protected] or (513) 742-2020. The deadline for early registration is Aug. 4 and can be accomplished online at http://acgih.webex.com.